Sources: Salesforce has held talks about acquiring Slack, although a deal is not guaranteed
they've kind of become the tech acquirer of choice. Big enough to buy $20b businesses, small enough to avoid regulatory scrutiny. https://twitter.com/... Will Oremus / @willoremus : just a stray thought but the very nature of digital/internet business seems to militate in favor of rapid consolidation and monopolization due to scalability and lack of physical infrastructure to a degree that was unimaginable when our country's antitrust laws were written https://twitter.com/... Alex Konrad / @alexrkonrad : dear god it's the afternoon before thanksgiving, can the m+a reporters please cut us some Slack https://twitter.com/... Casey Newton / @caseynewton : Salesforce also loudly “held talks” to acquire LinkedIn and Twitter, so color me skeptical. On the other hand, not a lot of other likely acquirers out there, unless Larry Ellison and Walmart think TikTok needs a group chat feature https://twitter.com/... Cara Lombardo / @cararlombardo : .@WSJ Scoop: Salesforce has recently been in talks to buy office-messaging platform Slack Technologies, in what would be its bigger acquisition ever $CRM $WORK w/@lizrhoffman @danacimilluca https://www.wsj.com/... Steve Kovach / @stevekovach : I still think Teams > Slack Ari Levy / @levynews : Based on Slack's current market cap of $20.5 bln, it would clearly be one of the priciest software deals ever. IBM - Red Hat: $34 bln London Stock Exchange - Refinitiv: $27 bln (pending) Microsoft - LinkedIn: $27 bln https://www.cnbc.com/... Shiv Sharma / @shivsharma_5 : Wow. Big news but not surprised at all. $WORK is super strategic but weak GTM. They never matured into an enterprise SW company. This is @Benioff 's bread and butter, $CRM will do wonders with this https://twitter.com/... Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life : Slack shares up 24% today after WSJ report that Salesforce plans to buy them. This is probably the best outcome for Slack given they've failed to take advantage of remote work as much as Zoom and Teams is eating their lunch via integrated solutions. https://www.cnbc.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Slack has been an acquisition target for years: its 2017 raise at a $5B valuation already drew interest from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce. This report of renewed talks lands three years later, with Slack public and Microsoft Teams having become the bundling threat Slack was built to withstand.
The arc closes fast — within a week Salesforce announced the $27.7B acquisition, its largest ever — and the commentary that followed framed it as another defensive Big Tech acquisition enabled by weak antitrust enforcement. The later record is mixed: analysts found Salesforce customers unswayed by Slack, with its revenue growth decelerating through 2022.
First-order effects
- Slack's board and shareholders get a definitive exit path at a premium to its trading price, ending its run as an independent public company if the talks conclude.
- Salesforce, which had already been named a suitor back in 2017, positions itself to counter Microsoft's Teams bundling by owning the collaboration layer its CRM customers work in.
Second-order effects
- Microsoft's response is already visible in the corpus: bundling Teams with its office suite is the pricing weapon that forced Slack to seek a well-capitalized owner rather than compete standalone.
- Other product-focused enterprise companies — the wave of specialists Slack inspired — face a harder path as buyers conclude independent collaboration tools get absorbed by platform giants.
Third-order effects
- The deal became the template case for the defensive-acquisition critique: a $27B+ combination cleared with little antitrust friction, reinforcing the pattern Will Oremus flagged that digital scalability favors consolidation beyond what existing law contemplates.
- If the pattern holds, enterprise software stratifies into a few platform owners of the workspace — with the later revenue-growth decline at Slack under Salesforce suggesting absorption does not automatically preserve a specialist's momentum.
The trend: Enterprise collaboration is consolidating into platform giants through large defensive acquisitions, with antitrust enforcement too weak or slow to block them.